Like many of us, Robert grew up with Spirograph. He’s is also involved in woodworking and wood turning. He has been putting together a pin router system that will cut spirograph designs into many kinds of wood projects.

(If the only kind of router you know is the box that delivers your internet, then you need to understand that there is also a woodworking power tool called a router.)

Carpenters use routers to shape the edges of boards. Routers can be hand held or mounted in a table, allowing you to move the wood rather than the machine.

A pin router adds a simple guiding system to the router table. The pin, aligned with the router bit, enables you to quickly and accurately copy complex patterns and shapes from a template into a piece of wood. Guitar makers and small shop furniture makers use pin routers for accurate, repeated cuts. (Learn more about them here if you’re interested.)

Enter Spirograph, and Robert Roehrig’s pin router.

He found that the die-cast metal Spirograph (which I reviewed here) is able to do things that plastic pieces are too flimsy for. (Plus, it looks cool.)

You can see that he has screwed the ring to a “sled” which he can move freely with his hands. A piece of wood is attached to the underside of the sled with double-sided tape. As he moves the sled, the wood is engraved by the router bit. The pin, visible on the top, is aligned with the router bit. Because he can’t see what’s happening, he has to trust that every movement of the sled is transferred to the wood.

When he inserts the pin in a pen hole in the Spirograph wheel, and he slowly moves the sled around while keeping the gears engaged, the router bit carves out a spirograph pattern in the wood below.

“It’s like doing Spirograph in reverse,” he says.

This next photo shows the router bit beneath the table. You can see how it lines up with the pin on top.

Here (above) it looks like he has put another piece of plastic on top of the ring that keeps the inside wheel from jumping out – a hazard familiar to anyone who has used a Spirograph.

Finally, here are some little Square Bottles he turned, sporting medallions made with the spirograph unit.

I hope to hear more from Robert about his explorations. I’ll continue to share them here.

The post Carving Spirograph Patterns into Wood with a Pin Router appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

This kit includes patterns for the shaped wheels that were selling with the newer sets on the market at the time (and are included in the new sets since 2013): the triangle, oval, cross and bar. I have made blog posts and videos about using most of these. See: Triangle wheel, Oval wheel here and here, Valentines with oval wheel, Bar wheel.

It also includes a few patterns using the mysterious Swing Marker which I wrote about here.

If you’re going to print these off, click on the images one at a time to get the highest-resolution version, and then send that to your printer. You will have to scale them down to get them to print on a single piece of letter-size or A4 paper. (Go to the printer dialog’s advanced settings and reduce the percentage until the preview shows that it fits.)

The post 1971 Spirograph Refill Kit No. 4211 appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

I had a basketball, which I set in a suitably sized (crystal!) bowl to hold it steady, and proceeded to attach a Wild Gears ring (84 teeth on the inside) with putty and drew a pattern (Wild Gear 36 teeth). And to my surprise, it worked quite nicely.

I wasn’t intending to do it more than once, so I made a video of the whole experiment, which is below.

My basketball will never be the same. I used a black Sakura Micron 05 pen, which is permanent, archival and waterproof. Although I used some Wild Gears, I think Spirograph parts should also work.

Now that I think about it, though, the guy who asked the question was a wood turner. A basketball is spherically symmetrical and convex, so this might work on the convex side of a shallow turned bowl, but drawing on the inside of the bowl probably wouldn’t work as the inside ring teeth would be off the surface. An epitrochoid (drawing on the outside of the ring) might be possible, however, on a concave surface.

I don’t see it working on a spindle shape with cylindrical symmetry.

Here’s the video. Let us know if you try anything like this.

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It has been preserved on a fan website for Dr. Who, because Fisher’s company went on to produce toys based on that popular TV show.

Easier to read text is below the image.

Source: https://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Denys_Fisher_obituary#tab=Description

Engineer who invented the Spirograph, the toy that enabled everyone to draw perfectly symmetrical patterns

THE Spirograph toy, invented by the engineer Denys Fisher, is a clever device capable of producing the most intricate and ornate geometric patterns. Comprising a set of coloured pens and plastic cog wheels, with rails and circles for them to run along and around, it is an ingenious and absorbing plaything that has endeared itself to countless children for almost 40 years.

The Spirograph’s wheels are of different diameters, with holes for the pen tip at different distances from the centre. With the turn of the wheel, the pen traces ornate curlicues. Eventually, the pen returns to its starting point, creating a symmetrical figure. It was said that, like snowflakes, no two patterns are the same.

Born in 1918, Denys Fisher was brought up in Leeds, spending his early years living in a railway carriage in a field. He did not shine initially as a youngster, until illness laid him up for six weeks -weeks that he spent in bed with the company of Lamb’s Infinitesimal Calculus. Fisher was captivated, and a lifelong passion for logic and mathematics ensued.

Academia was not to his liking, however, and, after dropping out of Leeds University, he joined the family firm, Kingfisher (Lubrication) Ltd, where he developed new machinery to speed up the production of lubricants while also in-venting a new way of producing delicate springs.

In 1960 Fisher left the business to establish Denys Fisher Engineering in Leeds. The firm had been going for a year when he won a contract to supply to Nato all springs and precision components for its 20mm cannon shell fuses. It was a particularly tough assignment, requiring a small clock-like spring that no other British firm at the time felt confident it could manufacture. Fisher was undaunted, and spent six intensive months researching the mechanism and developing special-purpose machinery. Duly impressed, Nato awarded him a Pounds 50,000 contract to make five million units.

The assignment gave him the security and time he needed to pursue a project closer to his heart. The Victorians had been attracted by the idea of using gears and cogs to create patterns, but their modest achievements had largely been forgotten. Fisher had for some time sought to carry on where they left off, and he spent the Christmas of 1962 building, with his family, various drawing machines from Meccano pieces. Unhappy with the results, he shelved the project -until six months later he had his Archimedes moment.

Late one Sunday night he was listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and as the choral movement ended he had a vision: the new device would be made out of a series of perforated plastic cog-wheels and racks.

He hurried to his workshop where he created his prototype Spirograph from a Meccano cog and a geared ring. He had originally intended to create a draftsman’s tool, but on the advice of a colleague, he decided to market the Spirograph as a toy.

He spent 20 months perfecting his plaything, spending Pounds 1,000 patenting it in 16 countries. In March 1965 the first Spirograph went on sale in Schofield’s department store in Leeds. A feature about it on Blue Peter proved crucial, and the following year saw more than a quarter of a million sets sold throughout the UK. It was voted “UK Educational Toy of the Year” from 1964 to 1966.

Having met Joseph Steiner, the co-founder of Kenner Products -which had already successfully developed Play-Doh and was later to produce Star Wars action figures -on a trip to America, Fisher struck up an agreement with Kenner, and the Spirograph was well on its way to global success.

Spirography’s trippy, floral patterns were ideally suited to the era of psychedelia and flower power. Ovals, stars and rings produced by the Spirograph were soon found on lampshades, embroidery, Christmas cards, and -in its new year edition of 1967 -on the front of Punch. In that year a Spirograph was linked to an IBM computer in Australia, which estimated that the device could make a total of 15,625 patterns. It has sold more than 100 million units in 85 countries.

With this success, Fisher was able to sell his company in 1970. Denys Fisher Toys, as it became, went on to produce Dr Who figures before being bought by Hasbro.

Fisher settled in Dumfries before moving to Clappersgate, Cumbria, in the 1980s. He maintained his passion for inventing, and developed another drawing device, the Cyclex. He also worked with Hasbro in refining the Spirograph.

In 1940 he married Elizabeth Stephenson. They had a daughter and two sons. He later married Kate Wade in 1969. They had two sons.

Denys Fisher, inventor, was born in Leeds on May 11, 1918. He died in Furness on September 17, 2002, aged 84.

• Publication: The Times
• Date: 2002-10-26

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My favorite thing about this book is how it teaches you some basic principles about making Spirograph designs, then encourages you to improvise. Maybe, as it says, you can create a design that no one else has ever seen.

The writing style is relatively literary, compared to the minimalist writing found today. The booklet walks you through the different things you can do with one ring and one wheel, and takes you to the most difficult designs using two racks.

The older sets had one particular property that got lost sometime in sets made in the 1980s and later. The alignment mark was halfway up one side of the tooth. If you turned a wheel over and drew the same pattern again, it wouldn’t line up exactly. But this could be used to make a denser pattern. This feature is described in the booklet, and some designs are shown that use this technique.

This set also came with some sheets of paper that were divided in squares for drawing your nicest designs. The rings had lines that aligned with the squares, as you can see in the diagrams in the booklet. You could easily use them to make patterns with both rings, aligning them carefully with the squared paper.

Denys Fisher, by the way, was the inventor of Spirograph, and vintage UK sets carried his name. Sets made in the US and Canada did not, nor do the modern sets made by Kahootz Toys.

Thanks Ron, from all of us, for sending these photos and your observations!

Click on an image to see the slideshow of all the pages in the booklet.

The post Vintage Spirograph Booklet from 1968 appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

Conclusion: Spirograph is fun, but it’s a toy. Wild Gears is more expensive, and somewhat more difficult to use, but it’s a more serious drawing tool.

Shop Wild Gears at this link.

The post Spirograph vs Wild Gears Comparison appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

And we all know, here on SpirographicArt.com, that Spirograph is a Classic Toy. Nice to have the Royal Mail acknowledge it too.

Actually, they have every reason to be proud of it. Spirograph was developed and first marketed by a British engineer, Denys Fisher, and hit the stores in 1965. Kenner acquired the rights for the the American market and started distributing Spirograph in the USA in 1966.

The first patent on spirograph was, according to Wikipedia, registered by a Polish mathematician and inventor, Bruno Abakanowicz, but I have not seen any pictures of his invention. It may have been nothing like Denys Fisher’s plastic gears and wheels which we know and love.

You can purchase the stamp, along with those of the other Classic Toys, on the Royal Mail website here.

PS: Thanks to Jason from New Zealand for the heads-up about this stamp!

The post The Royal Mail Honours Spirograph with New Stamp appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

He applies his logical, problem solving mind to common pitfalls people run into, and comes up with creative solutions: where to keep your eyes, adding extra rings, using rare earth magnets rather than pins or putty, marking up your gears, and even cleaning up your mistakes!

A must-watch even for serious spirograph artists!

The post Spirograph Tips Video from Wayne Schmidt appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

Two rack setup with pins

Ready for a Spirograph challenge?

I didn’t get into the two-rack designs as a kid. Maybe I tried it once and found it too difficult; I don’t remember. But a request for some videos about them prompted me to sit down and give it a try.

The result is four videos (below), each one dealing with a different design.

Page 7 of the old Kenner Super Spirograph manual

I followed the instructions in my old Super Spirograph manual (image right). I have prepared PDFs of this page that you can download and print. Choose 8.5 x 11 (North America) or A4 (elsewhere).

The first video shows me first attaching the racks with “Spiro putty” (poster putty). Normally I prefer the putty, but I decided to use pins in this case as they make it easier to position the racks correctly. Note that I’m using a corkboard with the pins.

Not all the new sets (by Kahootz Toys) come with two racks. The Deluxe set has only one; the Tin set has one; the Die-cast set has none. However, the new Super Spirograph has two racks, as do the old Kenner Spirograph and Super Spirograph. See a detailed chart of what’s included in some of the sets here.

These designs are more complex and require a lot of concentration. However, I am now quite curious about experimenting with this method and creating some new designs!

If you try this technique yourself, feel free to share your experience in the comments below.

I’ve put my four videos in a playlist so you can watch them all together.

The post Designs with Two Racks: Instructions & Videos appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.

If you’re new to Spirograph and are trying to figure out how to make it work, or you just like watching patterns unfold, you’ll enjoy this video. It has been speeded up, so don’t expect your own efforts to go so quickly. Take your time!

Here are links to Mahesh Pendam’s website and Facebook Page, so you can show some Spirograph love.

The post Spirograph Video by Mahesh Pendam appeared first on SpiroGraphicArt.